Cross-Platform Backup Software

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Oct 03, 2007 at 02:32:13PM -0400, Kareem Shehata wrote:
> After reading through the August thread on backup solutions, I've decided to
> grab at least 1 external drive and start actually backing up my systems on a
> regular basis.  What I'm less certain of, is what software to use.  If it
> were just my Debian server, then I'd probably just stick with good old tar
> (although some kind of a front-end would be nice), but that's not all there
> is.  I've also got an Ubuntu workstation and a Windows Tablet.  This leads
> to a number of questions:
> 
> 1)  What can I use to grab all of that data in a coherent way?
> 
> 2)  Is it possible to just mount the drive to the server and have all of the
> end devices backup to it through the network?
> 
> 3)  Will it be possible to read the backup format in other tools and OS's?
> I'm thinking along the lines of either restoring well down the line (i.e.
> several years from the now) and the original software is long lost, or
> restoring a file from my tablet using my workstation (say because the HDD
> crashed, or simply because the machine is on loan).

Well something like tar should be readable by lots of systems.  Of
course just copying the files works too (I like rsync for making
backups) although then the file system on the backup device has to
support the permissions of the host system or you will loose those
(which sucks).

Tar across NFS or samba or other network connection works fine.  You can
also tar across an ssh connection if you prefer, just as you can rsync
over ssh.

--
Len Sorensen
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